Anne Phillips Ogilby, a bond attorney at one of Boston’s oldest law firms, on Oct. 31 last year relayed an urgent message from Harvard University, her client and alma mater, to the head of a Massachusetts state agency that sells bonds. The oldest and richest academic institution in America needed help getting a loan right away.

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

If there is one word to get an economist quaking in their boots, it is deflation.
Many major Western economies are in recession and others are heading towards it.
Some experts are warning that deflation could be next.
It is what happened in the Great Depression of the 1930s and in Japan in the 1990s.
"Deflation is, as it sounds, the opposite of inflation," said economist Diane Coyle on BBC World Services' Analysis programme.
"It means that the general level of prices is falling consistently over quite a long period of time.

According to Economist, Mobile phones have transformed lives in the poor world. Mobile money could have just as big an impact.
The use of mobile phone as a way to do banking is a neat idea. This is bridging the distant gap making the world even smaller place to live.
Now Money can move at the rate of telephone call. Today, it takes 3-5 business days to transfer money from institutional banks. If you go to money transfer agents, it is within 24 hours. Now with the phone, it is as fast as texting the message.

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession.

Credit default swaps are "instruments of destruction" that should be outlawed, billionaire investor George Soros said on Friday.
Soros said the asymmetry of risk and reward embedded in CDS exerted so much downward pressure on the bonds underlying the contracts that companies and financial institutions could be brought to their knees.

Industry executives in India feel least threatened by the economic slowdown or by prospects of an extended recession than their global counterparts. In fact, they are the most optimistic about a global rebound in economic fortunes, according to McKinsey’s Global Executive Survey completed in April this year.

"The opening of the third border pass between China and India could become a gateway for India-China tourism from Tibet to Sikkim and vice-versa," it noted. By 2011, when Nathu La is scheduled to be open for tourism, more than 300,000 Chinese are expected to travel through the mountain passes.